“A word with you, Captain,” Marco said, still some distance off.
Adam remained seated, ignoring the man.
“I heard you have given an order to execute the prisoners, contrary to my order and contrary to the creed of the Eracian army. Is that true?”
Die only once… “Yes,” Adam said, simply, dryly.
“You’re overstepping your authority, Captain,” Marco growled, annoyed.
Adam stood up. “This is my camp, my victory. My rules, Colonel.”
Marco’s mouth drew taut. His face reddened.
“Insubordination is a dangerous thing,” Commander Mali warned. “In times of war, the penalty is death.”
Very slowly, Adam drew his knife and cut his shirt. He pulled on the two ends of the fabric, tearing a wider gap down his chest. “You can kill me right now, if you want.”
His audience seemed stunned, even the rock-hard Mali. “You must be tired, Captain,” she said.
“I’m perfectly rested,” Adam retorted. “I want the prisoners executed. I want all the Caytoreans’ bodies collected, heads cut off, loaded onto wagons, and sent back across the border. That’s all.”
They were all silent. Adam noticed that quite a few men in their vicinity had stopped doing whatever they were doing and were listening intently. His wounded lieutenant was no longer grinning.
“Why do you want to do this?” Colonel George asked after a long pause.
Adam smiled mirthlessly. “Why not? The corpses do not need the heads. But when the enemy receives the shipment, they will get upset, or maybe even scared. And then, they will get reckless again, and we’ll have another victory. That is what we want, isn’t it, another victory?”
Commander Mali regarded him quietly, her face perfectly emotionless. “It has not been done in a long time. Mutilation of corpses is a thing of the past.”
Luckily, Adam was familiar enough with Eracian politics; some of his former customers had not been able to keep their dirty daily work away even from the bedsheets. “We’ve been fondling one another like a pair of retarded children, us and them, for too long. It’s time to stop playing. This is war, and we need to win it. And if it means besting the enemy’s atrocities, then so be it.”
Mali nodded, her thoughts drifting. The bloodbath wars of the past had become almost gentlemanly clashes in the recent years. With real, professional armies on both sides, the conflicts had turned into skirmishes. A certain code of honor was maintained.
Colonel Marco snorted. “So you think to scare the enemy with some heads. Is that your idea?”
Adam did not blink. “I have many more ideas.”
“The Caytoreans take no prisoners,” Shendor volunteered bravely, and Adam decided to promote him to first lieutenant. A wave of agreement blasted through the crowd of spectators, officers and common warriors alike.
“When they realize we take no prisoners, they will fight all the more ferociously,” George said.
“When they realize we take no prisoners, they will think twice before fighting,” Adam countered. “No man wants to die, no matter what his superiors say.”
“The patriarchs will oppose,” Colonel Marco spoke. “They will not allow bodies to be defiled.”
Adam spat. “I’ll decide what to do with their souls, and no one else.”
A murmur of dismay spread about. Adam’s words were borderline heresy. Even the soldiers, most of whom were only loosely religious, did not find his saying entertaining. It was an ill omen to speak of the gods in such a way.
“Any other day, I’d have your brains lopped off,” Mali said. “You must be in shock.”
Adam smiled. “The world has never been clearer to me than today.” He was free. A dead man had no fears.
Colonel Marco bit a curse and walked away.
“Spare enough Caytoreans so they can drive the wagons with the heads back home. Then, find me a scribe. I want a scroll written and given to each driver as a message to deliver when they return. It shall read: ‘I’m keeping the souls for myself. If you do not wish any more of your men to spend eternity in the Abyss, turn about and never come back. Signed, Adam the Butcher.’I want that written in blood.”
“Yes, sir,” Shendor said.
Commander Mali was not stupid. She could see the looks of admiration and terror among the soldiers. “So be it. This is your camp, your rules, Captain.”
Adam saluted in blank mockery. “Yes, sir.”
Major Lawrence, one of George’s officers, spared him a glance full of confusion, hatred, and awe. “You’re a madman,” the man offered and walked away.
That evening, they promoted him to major.
CHAPTER 18
Armin had spent a formidable amount of gold to gain access to the Grand Archive. This time, it was his own gold. He was not sure the council would approve of his deeds right now.
The Grand Archive was a giant library of leather-bound records, documenting all and everything the guilds did, from corn trade to prostitution sundries. It was almost absurd that all of these contracts and transactions would be so neatly and orderly stacked.
He had very quickly learned that there were levels of absurdity, though.
Door after door led into ever smaller chambers, with the content of written material becoming more disturbing the further he went. Then, he reached a door that his key would not unlock. Well, that would have to do, for now.
Armin selected three binders at random, careful not to disturb the fine layer of dust too evenly. He sat behind one of the desks. Inside its glass prison, the White Butterfly from Coled Island fluttered nervously, pale light radiating from its hairy body. Armin had not wanted to risk bringing open flame into this den of paper. He read the documents.
They did enlighten him into the minutes of small scandals between several guilds, and the rising threat of bribes among the City Watch, but there was nothing regarding any one of his victims.
This was his second night in the archive. On the previous occasion, he had very easily found the records about the eight deceased. Their entire history of trade was listed there, arranged by dates. But the latest document was months old, and it bothered him. A few omissions here and there would have slipped his attention. But it seemed the eight men had ceased to exist as important businessmen long before their death. It was no mere coincidence.
Armin reached inside his jacket. He did not favor burglary, but any decent investigator had to be able to get past locked doors in his quest for truth.
Within minutes, he was past his first obstacle. Three more doors yielded before he reached a dead end, a chamber with solid walls on the remaining three sides. He spent more than an hour reading, dark, disturbing reports, none relevant to his investigation. He sighed. Something was wrong; he could feel it.
Slowly, he retraced his steps and was back in the massive main chamber, with titanic shelves spanning into the darkness all around him.
Every business had its secrets. The darkest ones were never committed to writing. But then, sometimes they were. People liked to keep proof of their mischiefs, taunting the world to discover them, convinced they never would be. It was a basic human vice.
Armin had been an investigator for too long to hope to find assassination contracts and letters from mistresses in these annals. These were kept in private safes or not at all. But there had to be a lead, some sort of a clue. His eight victims had not simply stopped working one day, all together. And then died within days of one another.
He closed his eyes. He opened them. He smiled.
He went back to the catalog at the entrance, listing different branches of industry and the sections where the relevant records could be found.
Collective evidence. This was what he needed. One could hide a ship from the world, but one could not hide the world from a ship.
It took him almost two hours, but he found them at last. The monthly ledger from the dockmasters and quay masters. His heart pumped with thrill. Were his enemies smarter than he? He would so
on find out.
His fingers flipped the papers, his eyes pored over the neat writing. The butterfly clacked and tapped against the glass.
There it was. He almost laughed aloud. The port master might have forgotten to write the comings and goings of Perano’s ship, the Cormorant, and Perano might not have sailed for several months before his death, but the Cormorant did unload cargo at the docks.
Armin grinned like a fool. Dockmasters were among the most anal people in the world. They loved inventory. It was their joy. Woe the dockmaster who forgot to list down the cargo of a ship or didn’t find a crew to unload her.
At first, the records were tidy, complete. Slowly, discrepancies began to emerge. The Cormorant sailing to an unknown destination, with three hundred and nineteen souls aboard, no names. Came back with just eighty-four crew and no cargo.
Disease? Maybe some of the people had died from a disease? Armin went back to searching. The logs of the harbor quarantine reported no remanded sailor any time near the specific date. Piracy? He checked for insurance claims by Shipmaster Perano, but there were none. Then, he checked two quarterly pay lists for names of missing crew members. None. The Cormorant had sailed to her mission and come back with every one of her crewmen. So wherever the ship had gone, it had dropped a solid load of near two hundred people.
Reading on, he found another four instances of similar endeavors. The Cormorant would sail into the unknown, loaded with nameless people and crates of unknown content, to return empty.
He remembered something. Again, time passed as he flipped pages, sneezed and sniffed, read, squinting in the pale, ethereal insect light.
He checked his notes. Shipmaster Lloyd had said that the Cormorants dissolved crew had been employed by other captains. With painstaking precision, he went through the records of more than thirty other skippers. There had been some minor changes to their roster, the usual come-and-go of workforce, but none had taken aboard even one of the Cormorants orphans.
Herbert, master of the guild of miners. There. One of the silver mines outside Eybalen had reported more than a forty percent drop in ore production roughly at the same time Shipmaster Perano had started taking on mysterious cargo. A coincidence?
Flip, flip, flip. Time rushed. It would soon be dawn. He had to leave. Pay lists for miners. No wages to more than half the force for almost half a year. Why?
Stefane, chief engineer of the engineers’ and sappers’ guild. What did their records have to say? Complaints about the lack of maintenance in some of the less prosperous neighborhoods. A station closed, crew dismissed. Pay lists, nothing of value.
Armin closed all of the binders and then carefully placed them back on the shelves. He would have to come back again. The truth was hidden somewhere in these records. He pocketed the fretful butterfly and left.
Three days later, he was invited to interview the Widow Nespos. His head swam in riddles, clues, unanswered questions, leads that made him twitch and miss hours of sleep at night. The annals were an infinite warren of information. He wished he had some of the young investigators with him, to simply help him bear the brunt of so many details, so much data.
He knew one thing. They were lying to him. Everyone. The council, the guild members, friends and relatives of the murdered. There was lots of money involved in this dark plot, whatever it was.
His carriage arrived shortly before noon. He stepped out, smoothed his robe, and waited for the butler to admit him. The richer Caytoreans loved pomp and etiquette. Much of their wealth was wasted in purely trying to impress others.
Like most nobles, Nespos had carved a statement of his power in marble and alabaster and a miniature forest, all within the walls of his mansion, which vied with hundreds of others for recognition among the finest and richest of Eybalen, on the crest of a hillside overlooking the lower city and the harbor.
Armin had to admit the vista was splendid, though.
“We meet again, sir,” the servant said.
Armin ignored him, not sure how to respond to small talk from the help. Sirtai’s slaves never spoke to their masters unless spoken to. And then, there was no consideration how one should treat them, although it was unpopular to be rude or savage.
Widow Nespos was called Cybilla. She was a rather surprisingly beautiful and young woman, just a trifle chubby, with a healthy complexion and big, doelike eyes. Like most Caytoreans, her skin was two shades paler than his.
He had expected to meet someone more like his age. This momentarily threw him off-balance.
“Greetings, Lady Cybilla,” he said.
“Investigator Wan’der Markssin, it’s a pleasure,” she replied, her smile and her eyes in discord. She grimaced unconsciously as his name rolled off her tongue. Was it the fact that he had more than one?
They sat on a terrace, beneath an awning of vines ripe with early autumn grapes, sipping wine, eating olives. The whole of Eybalen was before them. The hundreds of docking ships looked like pearls on a cushion of blue suede.
The butler came to ask him whether he preferred lobster or squid. For all the cardinal differences between the two nations, they did share the same sea and the same catches.
“I have heard you are trying to solve the mystery of my husband’s death,” she said, drinking her third glass of wine. Armin made a quick mental note.
“Including several other murders,” he said.
“I wish to help you,” she stated dramatically.
Armin would have made his brows arch up—if he’d had any. “I’m grateful.”
Cybilla squirmed, recrossing her legs. He could not help noticing how her soft flesh bounced beneath the satin of her dress.
“I will ask you some questions.” He produced a mangled booklet from one of his pockets, flipped a few curling pages, and found what he wanted. It took him a moment to translate from Sirtai; he wrote in his native language to reduce the chance of casual spying.
“Was your husband a follower of the Movement, a Feoran?”
Cybilla was quiet for a moment, then burst out laughing. She had a very big mouth and a very annoying laugh. “You must be joking, Investigator Markssin!” Some of the wine sloshed up her nose, and she gargled, “Oh, my husband was not a believer of anything. Like most of us.”
Armin let her talk. But this new fact was most intriguing.
“Gods are for the poor and unfortunate. Rich people do not need them. They can make their own destiny. Like myself, like the entire council, Nespos was an atheist.”
The investigator ran a quick mental check. “I was aware that most merchants and nobles donated significant sums of money to the houses of gods.”
“Definitely” she said, unfazed. “The patriarchs do have their merits, despite their misplaced beliefs. They keep the riffraff in check. Common people are so easily cowed. The clergy make for such splendid chaperones.”
Another important fact. “Do you have any idea where he sailed in the last few months?”
Cybilla let her smile fade. “Not really. My husband was not very forthcoming regarding his explorations. He did not want other chart-makers to know exactly where he would be going. But he mostly explored the seas.”
“Did you notice anything strange?”
She shook her head, gulping more wine. “Not really. He would leave, then return after several weeks. And I would stay here, all alone and bored.”
Armin was not too well-informed in the art of flirtation in Caytor, but he felt Lady Cybilla was much more forthcoming than he had expected.
“I’m a widow now. All I have left is the memory of my husband.”
And his entire wealth, Armin thought, perhaps a bit unfairly. “Did he keep his…maps at home, perhaps? Maybe a sailing journal?”
Her mouth full of wine, she shook her head. She was flushed. “Larol, leave us. Do not disturb us until I say so.”
Nodding stiffly, the butler retreated.
“Do you know what the most powerful aphrodisiac is, Investigator Markssin?”
&nb
sp; Armin wanted to tell her, the blood of the blue lizard from Conoya, but he said nothing.
“It’s grief,” she slurred slightly. “I’m lonely. I have no one to keep me warm at nights.”
“That is very unfortunate, my lady,” he agreed formally.
Cybilla let one of the shoulder straps of her dress slip. Armin was fascinated by the soft, pale skin of the continentals.
“Will you indulge a widow, alleviate some of her grief?” she pleaded, doe-eyed.
Armin shrugged. Caytoreans were very conservative regarding multiple partners, but Sirtai knew better. His wives would be proud of him.
CHAPTER 19
Ayrton did not know why he had decided to leave the city. Maybe it was his desire to seek out revenge against the patriarchs. Maybe it was the simple need for survival. But he was thinking about it quite a lot as he led a procession of soldiers and refugees away from the ruins of Talmath.
The gods and goddesses must have smiled upon him that day. He had managed to hold that mass of deranged and lost people in thrall, had managed to maintain his authority over them. Perhaps, all people ever needed when in dire peril was someone who looked a little less frightened, a little more confident.
The battle for Talmath was lost. No one would acknowledge it aloud, but it was the bitter truth. It had been a matter of days before the Caytoreans launched the final offensive and captured it. The fires had proved to be a useful distraction. Under the veil of smoke and confusion, he’d led his ramshackle army out of the city under the cover of night, slipping past the thin siege line west of Talmath. He had cut through the Borean Woods, an old forest of oaks and hornbeam, and was now wandering across the vast, rolling plains of the central Territories.
Two days away from anarchy and carnage, they could still see the smoke above the plains, a big blot of gray against the soft blue summer sky.
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